An academic career is often represented as the gradual conversion of intellectual quality into professional recognition. The image captures something important, since research, teaching, publications, funding, and professional competence matter; yet it becomes misleading when treated as a description of how academic selection actually works. Careers develop within institutions that distribute opportunities through procedures shaped by timing, geography, prestige, funding, disciplinary expectations, personal circumstances, and a considerable degree of contingency. Any serious reflection on an academic career must begin from this tension: merit matters, yet it never operates alone.

Academia, meritocracy and Uncertainty

Anyone who wants to pursue an academic career and, eventually, obtain a permanent position needs to develop some form of strategy. By strategy I do not mean a rigid plan in which publications, fellowships, and applications are fixed years in advance, since academic careers are far too unstable for this. I mean, rather, the way in which choices concerning research, publications, teaching, funding, mobility, international networking, and the gradual construction of one’s profile are connected. Every strategy is individual and depends on the discipline, research interests, economic possibilities, willingness to move, and priorities outside academia; there are, however, some recurring features of academic life that are worth understanding before making these choices.

One of the most important concerns meritocracy. The meritocratic image of academia can be understood as a descriptive claim, according to which opportunities are in fact distributed on the basis of merit; as a normative claim, according to which they should be; or as an institutional narrative through which universities present themselves as places of openness, excellence, equity, and collaboration. These three levels should not be confused. The normative ideal remains defensible, whereas the descriptive claim is false: academic opportunities are never distributed on merit alone. The institutional narrative, finally, expresses a genuine ideal while also contributing to the legitimacy of institutions competing for students, researchers, funding, and visibility.

Academic competition takes place on an uneven playing field. Conditions vary across disciplines, countries, universities, departments, and intellectual traditions, and they are shaped by economic resources, language, nationality, mobility, professional networks, family circumstances, and access to good mentors. A brilliant student from a school with little experience in access to elite universities may possess exceptional potential and still face a very different path from someone educated at a highly selective institution. Similarly, a young researcher with an excellent doctorate from a little-known university may be perfectly capable of conducting research at the highest level, while the name of the institution on the CV continues to influence how the application is read.

The same dynamic affects international mobility. A researcher who has completed an excellent postdoc at a peripheral institution may be highly regarded among specialists and still find that their institutional background is interpreted differently from that of someone coming from Oxford, Leuven, or the Sorbonne. At a later stage, a scholar who edits an important journal in Serbia or works in China may make a substantial contribution to an international debate while remaining relatively invisible in other academic circuits. Different mechanisms produce the same effect here: academic quality is produced, recognised, and rewarded within structures that distribute opportunities unevenly.

These differences become stronger because advantages and disadvantages tend to accumulate. Access to a prestigious institution may provide influential supervisors, broader networks, international conferences, and better information about future opportunities; these advantages may facilitate access to a fellowship, which can in turn lead to new publications and contacts. This process is usually described in terms of cumulative advantage or the Matthew effect (Merton 1968). The same mechanism can operate in the opposite direction: limited funding may reduce mobility, lower mobility may constrain networks, and a weaker network may make it harder to obtain information, invitations, or collaborations. None of these factors determines the future, yet together they alter probabilities and make careers partly path-dependent.

Institutional selection adds another element. Universities rarely ask in the abstract who the best scholar is, since they need to establish who can teach particular courses, complement a department, develop a research area, attract funding, or satisfy the profile required at that moment. Merit is accordingly evaluated within specific institutional conditions. This helps explain why excellent candidates may repeatedly lose competitions and why the same person may be rejected by one institution and enthusiastically hired by another a few months later. The outcome of a competition tells us only who was selected for a particular position under particular conditions; it cannot establish who is the best philosopher, historian, or researcher in absolute terms.

The relationship between academic capital and employability makes the problem even clearer. Over time, a young researcher will normally strengthen their profile through publications, teaching, grants, international networks, conferences, projects, and other forms of professional experience. It would be natural to expect employability to follow the same curve, yet careers are organised by stages and expectations change with them. At the beginning, potential is evaluated above all; later, results, independence, teaching experience, visibility, and the ability to obtain funding become increasingly important. At a still later stage, it may also matter whether these results have already been converted into institutional recognition.

Universities find two profiles relatively easy to interpret: the brilliant early-career researcher, whose profile tells a story of promise, and the established scholar, whose CV displays already recognised achievements. The situation becomes more complicated for those who remain between these two categories for a long time. A researcher may continue to accumulate publications, experience, and recognition while remaining in temporary positions; from one perspective, the CV becomes stronger each year, while from another the absence of a permanent position may begin to affect how that CV is interpreted. The paradox is clear: someone can become academically stronger and, at the same time, eligible for fewer opportunities because the expectations associated with their career stage have changed.

Structural uncertainty intensifies these problems. A strong profile increases the probability of obtaining positions, grants, fellowships, and publications, yet it guarantees none of these outcomes. A committee may be looking for a different profile, a department may change its priorities, a referee may attach great importance to a weakness that another considers marginal, or funding may be reduced and a position postponed or cancelled. Some of these factors are structural and others accidental, but together they make academic selection fundamentally uncertain.

This does not mean that careers are entirely random. The quality of research, applications, and preparation substantially changes the probabilities without turning them into certainties. For this reason, a useful strategy distinguishes between what can be controlled, what can be influenced, and what remains outside our control. We can improve our research, write better, prepare for interviews, and develop skills; we can also build networks, collaborations, and visibility, although the outcomes will always depend on decisions made by others. We cannot decide how many positions will exist, who will sit on a committee, or how strong competing candidates will be. A good strategy concentrates effort where agency is real without turning uncertainty into a fantasy of total control (spoiler: total control does not exist).

Funding, Stages, and Geography

The absence of a single career sequence becomes particularly evident after the doctorate. Trajectories can develop through very different combinations of postdocs, teaching positions, individual fellowships, project-funded positions, tenure-track jobs, permanent positions, and grants. Much depends on the country, discipline, available funding, and mobility. It is more useful to think of the academic market as an ecology of opportunities rather than a single ladder, since formally similar positions may offer very different degrees of autonomy, experience, and future possibilities.

An important distinction concerns the relationship between researcher and project. With an individual fellowship, one normally proposes one’s own project, and the application evaluates both the quality of the research and the candidate’s profile. With a project-funded position, by contrast, one is hired within research that has already received funding and whose general lines have been defined by the principal investigator, or PI. Both options can be excellent, yet they perform different functions in the construction of a profile, and this difference becomes more important as a career advances.

A research proposal, in this sense, is a structured description of future research written to persuade an institution to make that research possible. Unlike an article or a book, it must explain what one intends to do, why it matters, how it will be carried out, and why the candidate is able to complete it. Funding institutions also rarely fund a research question alone: a doctoral fellowship also funds the training of a researcher, a postdoctoral fellowship supports a transition towards greater independence, while a major grant presupposes intellectual leadership and the capacity to manage resources. Funding schemes thus implicitly construct different models of the researcher, and a proposal must be coherent with the career stage that the call is designed to support.

Time introduces a further constraint. Many fellowships and grants use eligibility windows linked to the number of years since the doctorate, and these vary across schemes and over time. Academic systems thereby impose institutional clocks on careers, while actual trajectories are shaped by unemployment, temporary contracts, family responsibilities, health, mobility, visas, and economic possibilities. An excellent opportunity at one moment may become irrelevant only a few years later, while a less prestigious position may provide exactly the experience or eligibility needed for the next stage.

Geography further complicates the picture, since there is no uniform global academic market. In the United States, a significant part of uncertainty continues to be concentrated around entry into the tenure track, although postdocs, visiting positions, and temporary appointments are increasingly common and competition remains particularly strong in philosophy. In the United Kingdom, there has traditionally been a relatively early transition towards permanent lectureships, although the recent contraction of the university sector has especially reduced early-career opportunities. In China, by contrast, the expansion of the university system is often accompanied by demanding performance criteria and a strong institutional hierarchy.

Continental Europe is more heterogeneous, yet it often involves a long transition between the doctorate and stable employment, composed of postdocs, fellowships, project-funded positions, temporary teaching, and competitive grants. The recent extension of the ERC Starting Grant eligibility window to ten years after the doctorate can also be read as a recognition of the increasing length and complexity of these trajectories. It is precisely the kind of environment in which academic capital can continue to increase while institutional stability is postponed.

These sketches should naturally be treated with caution. Their purpose is to show how geography redistributes uncertainty and largely determines where and when it is encountered, rather than to establish which system is better. Mobility can provide access to different research traditions, networks, institutions, and opportunities, yet it carries economic, personal, and family costs that are themselves unevenly distributed. For this reason, a fellowship, postdoc, or temporary position should be judged primarily by what it makes possible afterwards. Prudence consists precisely in evaluating timing, risks, and constraints without reducing an intellectual life to pure career optimisation.

Evaluative Legibility

The peculiar character of research proposals becomes clearer when we consider how they are evaluated. Different schemes organise evaluation according to different criteria: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, for example, use Excellence, Impact, and Quality and Efficiency of the Implementation, while FWO Postdoctoral Fellowships distinguish between Candidate and Project. Beneath these differences, however, a relatively stable set of questions returns: does the project deserve to be carried out? Is it original? Is the methodology appropriate? Is the candidate able to complete it? Is it feasible? What will change if it succeeds? Understanding these questions is more important than memorising the structure of a single template.

A proposal is also rarely evaluated by one person alone. It may pass through administrative checks, individual evaluations, external specialists, panels, consensus processes, and final rankings. MSCA and FWO organise these stages differently, yet the underlying problem remains the same: a proposal must remain convincing while being read by people with different forms of expertise and compared with other proposals.

Imagine a proposal on medieval hylomorphism. A specialist in medieval natural philosophy will immediately understand why a controversy over prime matter matters; a historian of medieval philosophy working on ethics will understand the general context but may need an explanation of the specific relevance; a historian of another period or a phenomenologist will require further contextualisation. All may be perfectly competent evaluators, yet they need different amounts of information to understand the same claim.

An effective proposal must consequently work at different levels of resolution.

• title, keywords, and abstract establish the project’s general identity
• the opening sections should make the problem, relevance, objectives, and expected contribution accessible
• the state of the art and methodology can become more specialised
• the work plan, risks, and implementation finally make the project assessable in terms of feasibility.

The level of detail changes, yet the argumentative thread remains the same. Something similar applies to classification: title, abstract, keywords, disciplinary categories and, where applicable, panel choice help determine the intellectual context in which the proposal will be read. This is particularly important for interdisciplinary projects.

The abstract has a decisive function because it provides the first complete representation of the project. A competent reader outside the immediate specialisation should understand what problem is being addressed, why it matters, what the project intends to do, where its originality lies, and what will change if it succeeds. An abstract can never simply compress the most technical part of the research; it must make that research accessible without flattening its complexity.

One of the most common mistakes is to imagine an ideal audience that knows the same literature, shares our terminology, and immediately sees why the question matters. In a proposal, these assumptions are especially dangerous. One must explain enough to make the intellectual stakes clear without turning the application into an introduction to the entire discipline. In this sense, legibility is a component of evaluability.

The same point can be described in terms of evaluative friction. Evaluators read many applications and should not be forced to reconstruct the research problem, search for the objectives, or infer originality and feasibility from information scattered across the text. An unclear structure, undefined concepts, excessively technical language, or objectives hidden in long paragraphs increase the effort required to understand what the proposal is doing. The evaluator should spend intellectual energy judging the research rather than deciphering it. Reducing this friction means making its structure visible.

This matters especially because evaluation is criteria-based. The criteria tell evaluators what to look for and should accordingly tell candidates what to make visible. A simple rule follows from this: the criteria should be read before writing begins, since they need to inform the architecture of the proposal rather than being applied retrospectively to a project already described elsewhere.

Terminology and criteria vary from one funding scheme to another, yet every scheme evaluates both what is being proposed and the person proposing it. The general principle is alignment. The project must fit the funding instrument, the proposal must respond to the evaluation criteria, the candidate’s profile must make sense in relation to the model of researcher presupposed by the call, and the level of explanation must suit the readers who will evaluate the text. This means understanding how the value of the research needs to be expressed in order to become visible within a particular evaluative system, rather than changing the research simply to please evaluators. One cannot expect qualities to be rewarded when the proposal fails to make them recognisable.

This alignment normally revolves around a small number of substantive questions. The first concerns relevance: the state of the art must identify a problem, tension, or limitation that makes further research necessary, since the existence of a simple gap does not show that filling it is worthwhile. The second concerns originality: a strong proposal must explain what will change as a result of the project, for instance through a new interpretation, new evidence, a different method, or a connection between previously separate debates. Originality and relevance remain closely connected, since novelty alone does not make a project important.

The third question concerns coherence. Research problem, research questions, objectives, methodology, and expected results should form a single structure in which the way each element leads to the next is clear. The fourth concerns feasibility: time, resources, work plan, host environment, risks, and alternative strategies must show that the project’s ambition has been translated into a credible programme. Risk is not necessarily a weakness; unmanaged risk is.

A fifth question concerns the candidate. Previous research, skills, methods, networks, training, and intellectual trajectory provide evidence of the ability to carry out what is being proposed. Especially at postdoctoral level, the project need not reproduce previous work, while the transition towards new skills or greater independence must remain intelligible. Finally, every proposal must explain what will change if it succeeds.

All of this depends on a simple yet fundamental distinction: a research project and a research proposal are two different things. The project is the research one intends to carry out, whereas the proposal is the object through which other people decide whether to provide the resources required to carry it out. The proposal translates research into something that can be understood, evaluated, compared, and ranked, and this recoding necessarily involves selection, simplification, and persuasion.

For this reason, the question “What do I want to investigate?” is insufficient for writing a good proposal. One must also ask where the evaluator will find the originality, the objectives, the relationship between methodology and research questions, the evidence of feasibility, and the required skills. A good proposal should make complex research intelligible and assessable.

Storytelling and Branding

The problem of legibility extends beyond the writing of a research proposal. Every form of academic communication involves selection and organisation: when we write an article, present a paper, apply for a position, or prepare a proposal, we decide where the problem begins, which information is relevant, what previous approaches fail to explain, and what difference our intervention makes. Academic communication thus possesses a narrative structure, and storytelling concerns the way these elements are connected so that the intellectual movement of the research becomes intelligible to others.

Much of our research can be represented as a story in which a researcher encounters a problem, previous approaches fail to resolve it completely, a new intervention is proposed, and something changes as a consequence. Actual research is naturally more complex, yet the model makes a basic point visible: the reader needs to understand where the argument is going. For this reason, storytelling should be understood primarily as a problem of intelligibility rather than ornament, with the level of explanation adapted to the audience while the intellectual structure of the research remains unchanged.

The same problem appears at the scale of an entire career. Over time, publications, projects, teaching, collaborations, grants, and public activities produce a broader story about the kind of scholar one is. This is where the admittedly uncomfortable language of academic branding becomes useful. By branding I mean the gradual construction of a distinctive and recognisable academic identity through which other scholars associate our name with particular problems, authors, methods, projects, or intellectual commitments. In this sense, branding concerns above all the legibility of a complex trajectory.

The term may sound commercial, yet the underlying problem is real, because committees, evaluators, editors, and collaborators rarely encounter the entirety of our work and reconstruct a profile from partial information. Publications, affiliations, teaching, conferences, public engagement, and other activities all contribute to this reconstruction. High-quality research does not automatically produce a recognisable profile. Branding concerns the process through which different research activities acquire sufficient coherence and visibility.

This identity has both a retrospective and a prospective dimension. Previous activities create expectations about who we are as scholars and provide the evidence from which others interpret our trajectory. At the same time, the profile constructed in this way shapes future opportunities because it influences how new projects, applications, and collaborations are read. For this reason, branding should not be left entirely to chance: it is always useful to ask which aspects of one’s work are becoming visible, which remain hidden, and whether the profile perceived by others corresponds to the scholar one actually wants to become.

Legibility also creates constraints. Once strongly associated with a topic or method, others may expect us to continue in the same direction, and previous success can become a form of path dependence. The academic system tends to reward continuity because it is relatively easy to evaluate, yet intellectual development sometimes requires changes of topic, method, or conceptual orientation. A very strong brand can consequently become an epistemic trap precisely when it makes it more costly to abandon an approach that has been professionally successful while becoming intellectually unsatisfactory.

A good strategy should keep a profile coherent enough to be recognisable and flexible enough to allow intellectual development. Branding can alter the probability of obtaining particular opportunities, yet it does not eliminate structural uncertainty: even a highly recognisable scholar can lose a competition, fail to obtain a postdoc, or find themselves in a market where their profile is difficult to place. Legibility should support an evolving trajectory rather than imprison it.

In my view, a useful academic strategy combines four dimensions: prudence, self-reflection, academic branding, and a sense of purpose. Prudence concerns timing, opportunities, risks, and constraints, while self-reflection seeks to align what one wants to do with one’s present position and the direction one wishes to take. Branding constructs a coherent and legible profile without reducing a career to an artificial persona, while a sense of purpose introduces a broader normative dimension. An academic career should never be conceived exclusively as an individual competition for positions, grants, and recognition, since every scholar participates in the broader process through which the institutions where research and teaching take place are shaped. This sense of purpose includes questions of inclusion, equity, intellectual openness, responsibility towards precarious researchers, and the ethical quality of academic evaluation.

The four dimensions interact differently at different career stages, and their balance changes over time. This is precisely why every academic strategy should remain a reflective practice: understanding the environment in which one operates, identifying where effort can make a difference, constructing a recognisable profile, preserving enough flexibility to continue developing intellectually, and maintaining a sense of what, ultimately, one’s academic life exists for. Under conditions of uncertainty, this is perhaps the most realistic form of agency available to us, if not the only one.